IS11 Technology Infrastructure Chapter 9 IT Infrastructure Shared technology resources that provide the platform for the firm s specific information system applications Investment in hardware software services consulting training education Shared across entire firm enterprise or departments Firm wide services Computing platforms Telecommunications Data management Applications Service Platform analyze the impact of services on your company how IT adds value to your firm By analyzing services it is easier to determine the value of investment 5 eras of IT Infrastructure evolution General purpose mainframe and minicomputer era 1959 present Centralized computing under control of programmers and system operators Most elements provided by a single vendor Minicomputers made possible decentralized computing and customized needs of specific departments middle range Mainframe support terminals through central mainframe largest computing unit Personal Computer Era 1981 present IBM PC in 1981 first widely adopted by American businesses Wintel PC standard desktop PC windows operating system with intel processor Windows o First DOS operating system then text based command language then o 2012 90 Windows 10 Mac o Wintel dominance is receding with increasing sales of android and iphone Client server Era 1983 present Desktop laptop computers clients are networked to servers Client user point of entry Server processes and stores shared data serves web pages manages network Two tiered client found in small businesses processing split between client and activities server Multi tiered n tier network balanced over different levels of servers Web server serves a web page to a client in response to a request for service locates and manages stored web pages Application server handles operations between user and organization s back end business systems corporate systems Enable businesses to distribute computing work across smaller machines More computing power and applications throughout the firm Enterprise Computing Era 1992 present TCP IP used to connect different networks together creating a centralized database and enterprise wide network achieves information flow across departments Links hardware and smaller networks into enterprise wide network Information flows freely across organization Cloud and Mobile Computing Era 2000 present Provides access to a shared pool of computing resources over a network the Internet Moore s Law Fastest growing form of computing 1 Power of microprocessors doubles every 18 months 2 Computing power doubles every 18 months 3 Price of computing falls by half every 18 months Law of Mass Digital Storage The amount of digital information is roughly doubling each year Cost of storing digital information is falling 100 year exponentially declines Metcalfe s Law and Network Economics Value or power of a network grows exponentially as a function of the number of network members demand is increasing more people using it more people want to join facebook Declining Communications Costs and the Internet Decline in costs of communication and exponential growth in size of the Internet Firms must expand internet connections to take advantage of this value Technology standards specifications that establish the compatibility of products and the ability to communicate in a network Economies of scale price declines Without economies of scale computing of any sort would be far more expensive than what it currently is Table 1 Unix multitasking multiuser portable operating system operates on a wide variety of computers from different manufacturers most widely used enterprise level operating system Transmission Control Protocol Internet Protocol TCP IP connects millions of computers in one network the Internet Infrastructure Components to provide the firm with a coherent infrastructure increasingly vendors have been forced to cooperate in strategic partnerships with one another 7 components that must be coordinated with one another 1 Computer Hardware platforms Dell IBM Sun HP Apple Linux a Blade servers computers consisting of s circuit board with processors memory and network connections that are stored in racks take up less space than traditional servers provide secondary storage b Chip producers Intel AMD IBM the industry has collectively settled on Intel as the standard processor for business computing with major exceptions in the server market for Unix and Linux who might use IBM or Sun c Mainframes continue to be used to reliably and securely handle large data still the digital workhorse for banking and telecommunications networks 2 Operating System Platforms Microsoft Windows Unix Linux Mac OS X i IBM Chrome Android iOS a Manages the resources and activities of a computer b Clients 95 run on windows server 85 run on Unix or Linux c Unix operating system for all types of computers machine independent used in high end work stations and servers d Linux reliable and compactly designed can run on many different hardware platforms free low cost used as an alternative to Unix or Windows NT e Chrome OS lightweight operating system for cloud computing using netbooks f Android open source operating system for mobile devices g h Windows 8 runs on tablets and PCs has an interface optimized for iOS features multi touch interface touch but also works with a mouse and keyboard 3 Enterprise Software Applications SAP Oracle Microsoft IBM a Middle ware by IBM Oracle to achieve firm wide integration 4 Data Management and Storage IBM DB2 Oracle SQL Server Sybase MySQL EMC Apache Hadoop a Responsible for organizing and managing the firm s data b MySQL Linux open source relational database c Apache Hadoop an open source software d EMC data storage for large scale systems e Storage area networks SANs connect multiple storage devices on separate high speed network dedicated to storage creates a large central pool of storage that can be rapidly accessed and shared by multiple servers 5 Networking Telecommunications Platforms Linux Novell Cisco Alcatel Lucent Nortel AT T Verizon Internet access a offer voice and data connectivity wide area networking wireless services b Windows Server predominantly used as a local area network operating system followed by Linux and Unix 6 Internet Platforms Apache Microsoft IIS NET Unix Cisco Java a Must overlap and relate to the firm s general networking infrastructure b Hardware software management services to support web site web hosting routers cabling or wireless equipment